Crg Hill's poetry scorecard

Websites Worthy of Hits

A quicklist:

Websites worthy of hits, of scores:

Big Bridge: www.bigbridge.org

Fence: www.fencemag.com

tin lustre mobile: www.poeticinhalation.com
9-28-03 Update: Tin Lustre Mobile Vol. 2 Iss. 15 / The Surrealist Anthology: This
special anthology edition features the Surrealist poets: Gellu Naum,
Andre Breton, Antonin Artaud, Rene Char, Gherasim Luca, Pierre Reverdy,
Phillipe Soupault, Louis Aragon, etc. Translations kindly provided by
Zack Rogow, Julian Semilian, Sasha Vlad, and Tom Hibbard.
http://www.poeticinhalation.com/surrealistantho.html

Muse Apprentice Guild: www.muse-apprentice-guild.com

Word for Word: www.wordforword.info

Sidereality: www.sidereality.com

Shampoo: www.ShampooPoetry.com

And Spencer Selby's immensely generous inclusive list: www.selbyslist.com

Why these? Why quick? Why not.
Why knot, the first loop, the first tug of lace (but never tightening, never loose, never noose)? If you haven't read/thought the contemporary poetry that rankles the consciousness of academia, K-12 to graduate (would you please go away visual poetry, please disappear language poetry, please not discomfit our familiar?), these are a space to start, a place to blanch before you find the color in what you didn't know before.

A Poem

a little hurt
you might use as an horizon

A Poem That Leans

A poem that leans
into its
own death

On Elizabeth Willis' Second Law

It's been suggested that there's more bad poetry written than good. That may be so, but that's not what concerns me. What frustrates me is that there's more good poetry than time to read it all. I miss a lot of it when it comes out.

Case in point: Elizabeth Willis' Second Law, published by Avenue B, in Bolinas just down the mountain from where I lived, in 1993. Was I not ready for this book? Was I deaf to it? Was I too noisy and busy? I undoubtedly crossed paths with advertisements for it.

This is a space breaking volume, slim though it may be (42 poems). Syntax, as elastic as it's designed to be to discourse, to deliver its short and long tensions, is stretched to its limits in these poems. The primary unit is a phrase, sometimes shoe-horned together without transition or binding punctuation: "There was bread but when plate draws home continent." When line breaks or stanza breaks are present, the stretch in the syntax is eased by the wider space between phrases: "The hands and the houses//locked//though they met//when I at such a door"

The fracture, the space, the "subjects" starting and ending in the middle, truncated at both ends, make the poems impossible to paraphrase. These are poems to inhabit:

first to see and then to imagine

hindsight is drown

Her vail

a weight less than

(An electron

as without task found her

These are poems for quiet readings.

A Poem, "an unexpected

umbrella accident"

Looking for a Poem to Signify Our Beginning

I teach. I teach tomorrow.
One hundred and twenty teenagers, high school juniors,
spread across five American literature classes.

Every year I search for the poem, the prose passage, the song,
to start the year with, to signify our beginning together, to point toward a place we will co-create.
I didn't find the song. Hmm...
Lots of possibilities, but no match of intensity with immediacy, depth with a clear surface.

I didn't find the prose passage. I didn't look far.

I didn't find the poem. I didn't find the poem for hours.

Robert Duncan's "Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow" came close.
John Haines' "The Stone Harp" came close.
Poems by Bob Perelman (from Primer and Captive Audience) came close. I considered reading his "Confession" again (from The Future of Memory), a poem students past found compelling, odd, quirky, not what they expected from a poem.
I thought about reading James Wright's "Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota."
I combed through America a Prophecy, edited by Jerome Rothenberg and George Quasha. I sifted through other Rothenberg anthologies: Technicians of the Sacred and Shaking the Pumpkin.
I leafed through books by Allen Ginsberg (a consistent student favorite), Lyn Hejinian, Charles Bernstein, Robert Bly (would teeth and fur fly if those two knew they were juxtaposed?), Gary Snyder, read poems by Denise Levertov, Gertrude Stein, Robert Creeley, Walt Whitman... I read dozens of poems looking for the poem that not only said "poem," but said, hey, this class has the openness of a poem, the thoughtfulness, the breath, the breadth in brief (I long ago realized I can't teach everything to everybody).

I settled on this, "I go among trees and sit still," the first poem in Wendell Berry's A Timbered Choir:

I go among tree and sit still.
All my stirring becomes quiet
around me like circles on water.
My tasks lie in their places
where I left them, asleep like cattle.

Then what is afraid of me comes
and lives a while in my sight.
What it fears in me leaves me,
and the fear of me leaves it.
It sings, and I hear its song.

Then what I am afraid of comes.
I live for a while in its sight.
What I fear in it leaves it,
and the fear of it leaves me.
It sings, and I hear its song.

After days of labor,
mute in my consternations,
I hear my song at last,
and I sing it. As we sing,
the day turns, the trees move.

A Poem

A poem
holds to rain
Time abandons.

A Poem that Relinquishes

the room it sits in

A Poem Whose Body

A poem whose body,
becoming shadow drama,
abandoned its space
in outer ceremony,
including screams,
completely engaged

A Poem in Which

A poem in which someone bends
toward a piano
to dream
as if fields were breaking open